In the years since Yahoo last did search, the amount of information to comb through on the web has increased — meaning much more noise to draw signal from. Meanwhile, potential employees serious about web search have long ago decamped to Google and Bing. Both those companies have huge teams involved in running mature search operations. Despite some Yahoo hires, there’s been no signs the company is drawing anywhere near the staffing that Google or Bing has.
Similarly, there’s been no signs that Yahoo is out busy crawling the web in order to build an index of all those pages — and that’s one of the things you want to do fairly soon, to ensure that you can not only store everything but also have good algorithms to pull the good stuff out in response to a search.

Count me in on thinking it’s not a likely pick for Apple. But we do know from Siri that Apple respects other search tools, and so I have to wonder: what if Yahoo’s going to acquire their way back into the search game.

What if Yahoo bought (or partnered with) Wolfram|Alpha and DuckDuckGo? What if the search tools Yahoo is building were meant to tie those to together instead of being a new search tool all together?

If you presented Apple with a hybrid of DDG and W|A, well I think you could make a strong case for being the default search provider. Or at the very least not be laughed out of the room.